Dr Roaa Ali is a researcher and educator with a growing research profile in race and the cultural industries, access inequality and the politics of minoritised cultural production. She is a Research Associate at the Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE) at the University of Manchester. Currently, she is researching racial and ethnic inequality in the creative and cultural industries at the intersection of Covid-19 and the Black Lives Movement (in collaboration with Creative Access).

She has written extensively about issues of inequality and diversity in the UK creative and cultural industries in the form of academic journals and online articles, and was a guest editor for the Open Access ‘Intersections, Institutions and Inequities: Axes of Oppression in the Cultural Sector’ special issue.

Roaa has a PhD in Drama and Theatre Arts from the University of Birmingham and her thesis explored Arab American and ethnic minority art production within the American cultural and creative industries. Her research in this area will be available through a monograph titled Contemporary Arab American Drama: Cultural politics of ethnicity, Otherness and visibility (Routledge), and a co-edited volume titled Arab, Politics and Performance (Routledge).